Just weeks before the release, Bruckheimer sits in an editing room, giving an advance preview of key scenes from At World's End. He looks fatigued from shuttling between Pirates and his other current production, National Treasure 2, but clearly proud. And with good reason — there are a slew of eye-popping sequences, including the sight of the Black Pearl being hauled across a desert on the backs of thousands of crabs, the introduction of the menacing pirate lord of Singapore, Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat), and a climactic ship-battle-and-sword-fight extravaganza between the British naval fleet and an armada of pirates in the middle of a giant whirlpool. Between clips, Bruckheimer explains the intricacies of the interweaving plotlines: the double crosses, the deceptions, the reversals of fortunes. Setting up one scene, he finds himself momentarily tongue-tied by the story's complexity. ''It's a little confus —'' he begins. He stops. He takes a breath. ''Let me back up a little.''
Back in 2003, just about no one was expecting a hit movie about pirates. But Curse of the Black Pearl pulled in more than $650 million worldwide, thanks to its rousing derring-do, its state-of-the-art effects wizardry, and Depp's instantly iconic turn as Jack Sparrow. Disney spied a franchise in the offing. The studio quickly ordered up two sequels, and Verbinski and screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio took up the challenge of turning a one-off popcorn flick into chapter 1 of an epic trilogy. The plan was audacious — to film the second and much of the third film simultaneously, at a cost that would reportedly soar upward of half a billion dollars — and they dove into the shoot with many creative decisions still to be made. ''We had release dates and blank pages,'' says Verbinski. ''It's like, How Not to Make a Film 101.''
As with other current franchises, Disney's approach to the Pirates sequels is vastly different from that taken in days of old. There was a time not so long ago when Hollywood considered sequels an afterthought, dumping them into theaters with noses plugged. But in the early 1990s, with the enormous success of Terminator 2 and the increasing ability to amp up the spectacle factor with newfangled digital effects, sequels no longer seemed such a tawdry business. The success of the Lord of the Rings films, each of which outgrossed the last, made jumbo-size trilogies de rigueur. ''People used to throw sequels out there as pure commerce — they'd try and fool the public the first weekend and then they'd die,'' says Bruckheimer. ''Now you have filmmakers who keep raising the bar.''
NEXT PAGE: ''When you pass the $1.1 billion mark, you start to suspect that you must be doing something right.''
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